Chapter 5
When Dr. Nietzsche finally said Perhaps it was too early for this visit and stood up from his chair, she thought: At last, because it seemed to her that if he stayed a minute longer she would have given herself away, probably by passing out. Then she heard the rustling of straw from the bed, from which she could conclude that Jakob had already stood up, and then his footsteps, the key in the door, Nietzsche’s conspiratorial and practically confidential Auf Wiedersehen! and she sensed her legs abruptly giving way beneath her as she slipped down the wardrobe: the last thing she felt was a sharp pain in her shoulder blades as she slid down the plank, and then there was a dull thud and, after that, darkness . . .
“Jakob,” she said, and that was the first thing that sprouted in her mind, with a weak flash, amid the crimson swirls, growing brighter and brighter, and then it was between her lips. Then those swirls started to expand in concentric circles and in the emerging gap she could make out Jakob’s face, bent over her, and she could feel his hand on her forehead. “Take that away, Jakob,” she said and with the same effort that it took to speak those words she raised her arm and pushed aside the little bottle of ammonia that Jakob was holding beneath her nose. And without turning her head she gathered that the light brightening Jakob’s face was located somewhere to the side, on the floor: Jakob’s placed the lamp with the shade on the floor, she thought all of a sudden, and she remembered everything that had happened and she clasped her arms around Jakob’s neck. He lifted her up and put her on the bed and returned the lamp with the shade to the table by the bed.
“How long was I unconscious?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “As soon as I locked the door, I raced back to the wardrobe. I realized immediately that something wasn’t right. I reached in my pocket for the key but couldn’t find it. Then I drummed my nails on the door of the cabinet, even though I sensed that something had happened to you. At the same time I recalled hiding the key under my pillow. I grabbed it along with the bottle of ammonia on the table and, wouldn’t you know it, I found you sitting on the floor of the wardrobe with your head tilted over onto your shoulder . . . I heard nothing at all when you fell,” he said . . . “Poor thing”; and as he caressed her she thought that Jakob must know everything now, because he has to have seen the blood and thus he knows that she is his wife, even if he hadn’t noticed anything earlier; otherwise why would he have said “You poor thing.” And then she said:
“I fell right as he was leaving.” Then, with the concealed pride of being Jakob’s wife: “I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t hold out a single minute longer. Your coat did me in. I don’t know how I can love a man whose coat reeks like this. I will have to find another man.”
Then he said:
“I don’t know how I can love a woman who passes out so easily. I will have to find another woman”; his palms lingered gently on her cheeks. In that moment of forgetfulness her thoughts temporarily swung in the opposite direction, with her eyes now immobile and concentrated on that one single point of focus where Jakob was to be found. She (Jakob’s wife) all of a sudden started to expand and evaporate; the red-hot focal point began to cool off as soon as—having long since learned to take slaps like this in stride—her consciousness began to take in her surroundings: the lamp with the shade—Jakob’s room—window blocked with a blanket—and beyond the window: damp gelid night, pierced by spotlights and barbed wire. The concentric circles then started to radiate through the night, into space and time, grazing the dim border between future and past, and when she quickly and fearfully and forcefully halted the waves being emitted by her mind and when they returned from the obscure and distant stretches of the night to Jakob’s room, to the two of them, all she found was a black, singed hole in her mind, there where, a short time before, there had been the hot focal point of the lamp with the apple-blossom lampshade; now in that place was that unhinged voice once again, a voice that sometimes ended sentences in a falsetto and which was known as “Dr. Nietzsche” . . .
“I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t understand what that guy wanted from you.”
“Covering his retreat,” Jakob told her. “What else would he be trying to do: protecting his escape route. Understand?”
“Not really,” she said. “It still isn’t completely clear in my mind . . . Is he not able to do all of that himself? Isn’t there anyone else he could order around, anyone else he trusts more? It doesn’t quite make sense . . . Tell me, Jakob: Is this really it?”
Jakob reflected for a moment.
“Judging by all this—yes,” he said. “By this comedy . . .” (Then he told her the real meaning of Nietzsche’s visit; it gave her a modicum of hope, and in the quantity necessary for fear not to take the day.)
She remembered: Jakob had told her then: Yes, judging by all this, and although there was doubt in his voice (at least it seemed that way to her), she nonetheless sensed a flash of hope in him and she sensed too that what was in his voice was only bitterness and not despair; and hope too of course. And more. Just now was the first time that Jakob had added, definitively if a little bit mistrustfully, “Judging by all this.” But he did not say: “Hope is a necessity. Thus we have to imagine it,” nor that other thing he added at the beginning: “Otherwise you won’t be able to hold out for one day in this camp. Without hope it would be as if a person were to break ranks and announce to everyone, to their faces, that they were doomed. Each and every one. Things couldn’t go on like that for even a single day. You have to live. Only the person without hope is a real corpse. Do you understand? That’s why you can’t abandon hope. Even if it flees, finding no room in your heart . . . Lure it back. Thaw it out. Revive it with artificial resuscitation, by trick-ery, or even by force . . .” But that had been right at the beginning, a day or two after they’d first met; she remembered: at that time she didn’t completely believe him; and alongside all the sincerity that resonated in his words, still it seemed to her that he said what he said out of self-confidence or out of cowardice and those both struck her as being pointless at that moment. Maybe he’s just some devious collaborator, or just a frightened one. Back then she hadn’t known him as well as she would. She’d only seen him one time before that. When she was arriving at the camp. Therefore she had said to him that second time, before she got to know him and while she still doubted him:
“Do you think, Doctor, that I can bother with something like hope here and now, in Auschwitz?” And she amazed herself with the trust in him that her voice then betrayed: “That at this very moment I can tap into the reserve of hope people carry in their hearts?”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “You’ve certainly suffered a great deal up to this point. But have you really lost hope?” She had no answer for him, despite the trust she’d begun to feel for him; she truly didn’t know how to respond, for who knows what’s going on in this game with no rules, “I hope/I have no hope,” like “I will/I won’t” or “He loves me/He loves me not,” because it was somehow always like this, both in the train car when they were being deported and on the way to the camp and earlier as well, on the Danube: she accepted it, and to her it seemed like she was reconciling herself to all that was coming her way, but later she realized that she had actually not acquiesced completely and that she hadn’t ever abandoned altogether a certain madness that could be called hope (perhaps not even then, at the Danube; but she was in no position now to be certain of that); thus she wanted to say to him that maybe none of it had anything to do with hope, for she had managed to stay alive that time by the Danube, back when it all started (it was three or four years ago), and instead maybe it was all nothing more than an absurd game without rules, a game in which it was impossible to stake anything, even hope, and she wanted to tell him the story of what happened back then by the Danube as she waited at the green peeling fence much as she used to stand in line for a shower during a summer heat wave; but she remembered that she hadn’t abandoned that insanity, which could a
lso be called hope, she hadn’t abandoned it even then all the way up to the point at which she lost consciousness; but her eyes would shut—even then (leaving between her eyelashes a narrow razor-like blade that cut through in an instant the reddish darkness that had fallen over her mind, thereby slicing through the gloom and leaving in her mind a fissure opening into the future)—even then with the hope (or whatever it’s called) that she would awaken and start to see again: to live. Despite the facts. Despite everything.—But she still hadn’t told him everything, because she sensed at the moment she was speaking with this man in his white coat, whose name she still didn’t know, that even now she was unearthing in herself a glow that could not be and is not called hope, although the source of this feeling lay not in her heart but rather outside of her, pushing into her consciousness and her heart like an unexpected heat wave: from his voice and in his eyes. And she thought: Hope isn’t in my heart, in my hands. All my hope lies in your words. In the Doctor’s eyes. But maybe she would already have thought: in your eyes. For this was an intimate feeling for which one needed no social distance.—But then of course she didn’t say it that way; she just shrugged her shoulders:
“I don’t know,” she said. Then mumbled: (“Maybe just once.”)
And then he asked, unexpectedly:
“Do you trust me?” Just like that: “Do you trust me? Or maybe that isn’t the right word . . . Anyway, it’s all we’ve got: trust.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.” If he had asked her that question in a slightly different way or if he had posed it earlier, before time had provided the answer, she would have merely shrugged her shoulders in resignation or she would have lied: “I think I do.”
But this was a day or two after she first met him. Or perhaps it had been five or six days since that first meeting. She no longer knew exactly. She remembered their first encounter: it was on the day following her arrival in the camp. They stood side by side in rows, naked, hair shorn; they were mostly young girls, still capable of working or of providing amusement to the German officers leaving for the Eastern Front or returning from there covered in medals and scars: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles; they worked doing the selections for the holiday camps: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles; only the healthy ones received consideration, pretty young girls who knew how to laugh and who were worthy of Aryan passion and the sperm of an Übermensch: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles! And that voice sliced like a knife through her exhaustion and her dream-state, speaking at who knows what volume and at an unknown distance from her, just strong enough for her to pick it up, like a whisper, just enough for it tear painfully into her consciousness, to cause her to raise her eyelids; but her own name sounded to her as distant and as alien as if it were coming from some other world. She stared with a vacant, absent look at the white stain of the coat and then her eyes suddenly grew clear as she simultaneously felt and understood that she’d been slapped; then the white stain moved from her iris and a face was projected before her: brown, smoothly brushed hair and two large buckteeth. The woman with the protruding teeth shouted again and drew so near to Marija that she could feel the next slap about to come, but then she heard, from somewhere off to the side:
“Stop! Damit genug! We have to be cautious”: the voice rose to a falsetto. “I think . . . Verstehen Sie? . . . Verstehen Sie?”
“Ja, ja, ich verstehe . . . Aber ich denke es ist doch nicht. Zu klein. Das Becken wie eines Kindes . . . Aber, insofern, Herr Kollege, denkt sie ist anziehend genüglich . . .”
“Du, Abschaum!” said the man with the yellow star. “Common trash . . . Permit me, Dr. Berta . . .” Behind her, he humbly moved his stethoscope to a spot under her shoulder blades. She was unable to see his face. She only heard his voice. It was the woman with buckteeth, the one they called Dr. Berta, who was asking the questions for her chart. Marija answered with that automatic strength that kicks into action during an onslaught of fear of death or tiredness.
“Mutan gemišt—mongrel,” said the voice behind her as she rattled off her answers mechanically, thereby laying bare her origins and conjuring up stray ghosts. “Definitely a mongrel.”
Then the voice that broke into a falsetto asked: “Would Frau Judengemischte—that’s what you said your name was, if I’m not mistaken—would Frau Judengemischte answer one more question for us? Let’s make this . . . essentially off the record, okay?”
Her eyes fixed, as if seeking refuge, on the woman with the protruding teeth, and then they scrolled over the shiny skull of Dr. Nietzsche, finally coming helplessly to rest on the grubby, shadowy square of the nearby window. She clenched her teeth in a desperate effort to transfer her thoughts through the window, outside to that invisible wire bisecting the horizon, but she lacked the power to carry this out. She could hardly think anything at all.
“Don’t just stand there. Answer.” Then loudly, cynically: “FRAU JUDENGEMISCHTE! HA HA HA. JUDENGEMISCHTE!”—and the first part of the sentence was spoken in Polish, whispered, intimate.
Doctor Nietzsche was very taken with her. He grinned.
“Frau Judengmischte! Have you ever had occasion to mix some Aryan substance into your mongrel self? I don’t mean in terms of your genealogy. Directly. A little pure Aryan fluid. Or any other kind, for that matter?”
The stethoscope on her heart transmitted to Jakob’s ear nothing but the waves flooding across the deck and the incantatory beginning of that ancient prayer recognized all over the world both on the sea and dry land: SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS! SOS!
“No,” she said, speaking in time with the slide of the stethoscope in Jakob’s hands from left to right, left to right, across her ribs: “No.”
“With your permission,” Jakob said at that point, laying aside the stethoscope, “in my opinion the Frau here is not suitable for such uses. Ordinary trash. A waste of time. Go away! Be gone!”
That had been her first meeting with Jakob, immediately after her arrival in the camp. And that’s the reason she was able to answer him a few days later: “Yes, I do,” when he asked her if she trusted him. That’s why she was able, without embarrassment, to bring out the words: “Yes, I do. I believe I do.”
Quietly she came to the door and signaled that she was ready. Then he turned off the already dimmed light of the lamp with the shade.
“Žana,” she said now in a whisper. “Did I ever tell you: switching on the lamp with the shade was actually a signal for Maks. That’s why Jakob had put a lightbulb in it that evening.”
“No,” said Žana absently. “You never told me about that . . . But sleep now. It’s still early. I’d say it’s just past midnight. If I haven’t completely lost my sense of time.” Marija could hear the rustling of the straw beneath Žana and she realized, without opening her eyes, piercing the gloom with them, that Žana was still lying on her stomach in the straw, propped up on her elbows, her eyes fixed on the crack. This position of alertness and the tension in her muscles, like in a cat ready to pounce—this Marija could only interpret as the result of the experience that Žana had gained in the resistance movement, which was hinting something to her again now. Although she had great respect for this sense of caution, so unknown and so nearly masculine to her, a respect likewise inspired by Žana’s reflexes, and although she now felt a bit uneasy because of her own passivity, she also considered at least telling Žana about what had happened afterward, but all she said was: “Once I almost saw him. Maks, that is”; Žana repeated her statement from before: “Devilishly clever fellow. That Maks.”—Therefore Marija couldn’t tell her—anyway not in just a few words—what it was like. That same evening, after the surprise visit from Dr. Nietzsche. Less than an hour afterward. As soon as she had left Jakob’s room.
After he had turned off the lamp with the shade, Jakob listened intently and then carefully unlocked the door. The only other thing she remembered was an embrace in the dark and the pressure of his body. Then she slid along the wall down the darkened corridor in the barracks. She could a
lmost recall how many steps she took, feeling the grim cold wall all the while. Then it happened, not even twenty minutes after Dr. Nietzsche’s departure. That’s when the invisible but omnipresent Maks appeared again, out of the darkness. And this is how it went: no sooner had she taken ten steps (with one hand extended into the void before her like a sleepwalker and the other resting against the wall) she felt a sharp pain in her shin and realized in that moment that she had knocked over something that would now echo through the whole barrack and that would be heard from one end of the hall to the other. At the same time she heard, from the end of the corridor, HALT! HALT! and the clacking steps of iron-shod boots. All she knew, all she could know at that moment, was that there was no way back into Jakob’s room, for it was already too late for that. She merely clung to the wall (what would have Žana done at a time like this?) and groped her way to a door. No option remained to her (the door was locked) other than to wait here for the brightening of the sharp beam from the flashlight sweeping murderously through the corridor right in front of her nose. From her precarious haven she could see one end of the heavy wooden bench that she had overturned with her leg and that was now lying lethargically on its back, like some sort of felled animal squirming in agony: the shadow of its fettered legs twisted and flickered in the backlighting of the oblique, whirling beam of the flashlight. She sensed that in a few moments the lethal ray would blind her and she would contort and carbonize as if struck by lightning, but before this thought could sink in completely and she could carbonize and turn black totally by herself as she shuddered with horror, she felt a giant hand grabbing her from somewhere behind her back, covering her mouth, and that same hand, in the same motion with which it had already yanked away the support behind her back, or so it seemed to her, pulled on her so that for a moment she was suspended in the air as if falling into a swimming pool or like when someone pulls a chair out from under you in that moment when you drop onto it tired and anticipating but find an emptiness much deeper than the chair itself, and then that hand pulled her somewhere up and back without ungluing itself from her mouth. Thus, barely comprehending what was happening to her, as if she had just woken up, she could hear the banging on the door and she realized simultaneously (as if that same knocking had revived her) that she was now in a safer refuge than she had been in a few moments ago when she was standing there glued to the wall: crammed under the bed where the invisible hand of the deus ex machina had stowed her in haste, she could only hear how the deus ex machina moved away from her hiding place with powerful slaps of his clogs and how he unlocked the door, and then she could see the beam of the flashlight, which wavered like the flame of a candle, slice through the narrow crack between the floor and the rough blanket hanging over the edge of the bed under which she was ensconced.
PSALM 44 Page 6
